Even if you’re nearly fluent in Spanish, you might not have the necessary vocabulary for specific contexts like customer service, so it’s important to get that vocabulary to improve your employment prospects.

Please stay on the line for eight helpful resources to learn Spanish for customer service!

Why Learn Spanish for Customer Service?

There are a lot of bilingual customer service positions, and a lot of them involve Spanish, especially in the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the number of customer service positions in general to grow faster than the national job growth average, and with a growing Hispanic population, the industry will definitely need Spanish speakers. And it’s easy to understand why Spanish speakers will be in demand. Why would a company want to hire one person to provide service in English and another person to provide service in Spanish, if they could just hire one person who could do the work of both people?

Bilingual customer service positions also often offer higher pay. In 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median income for customer service representatives was $15.25. Since an additional language is a major skill, bilingual employees are often paid more to reflect this.

Even if a position doesn’t require you to speak Spanish, knowing Spanish for customer service can give you a leg up on the competition. After all, it makes you more flexible and able to fill in if the company suddenly needs a Spanish speaker.

If you’re likely to encounter Spanish-speaking customers, learning customer service Spanish is often just easier than relying on someone else to translate. It can be a pain to wait for another employee to come help you do something. Even learning some basic customer service vocabulary could help you save yourself and the customer valuable time.

How to Learn Spanish for Customer Service

Consider how much Spanish you want or need to learn for your position. If you have limited and simple interactions with Spanish speakers, you might only need a few key phrases. However, if you regularly interact with Spanish speakers to solve complicated problems, you’ll need to know a lot more.

Practice, practice, practice. Consider what issues customers might want to address and run through a mock conversation. The more often you practice with different scenarios, the more vocabulary you’ll realize you need to study. This will help ensure you’re prepared if you ever encounter a similar scenario.

Ensure you learn any special terminology specific to your position or industry. The customer service industry is so diverse that you’ll certainly have some terms that are specific to your job and which don’t apply to many other customer service positions. For instance, if you work in a clothing store, you’ll need to know the names of various garments. However, if you work in customer service at a computer company, you’ll need lots of technical terms. Therefore, you’ll need to supplement your standard customer service vocabulary lessons with words you need for your job.

Use FluentU to see new words in use. FluentU is one of the best ways to learn Spanish forany purpose!

If you like learning Spanish, then you’ll love FluentU. FluentU takes real-world videos like music videos, commercials, news, and inspiring talks and turns them into Spanish learning experiences. Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You’ll learn Spanish as it’s actually spoken by real people.

FluentU has a wide variety of videos—topics like soccer, TV shows, business, movies, and even magical realism, as you can see here:

FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don’t know, you can add it to a vocab list.

The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you’re learning, and it recommends you examples and videos based on the words you’ve already learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they’re learning the same video.

8 Helpful Resources to Learn Spanish for Customer Service

BusinessSpanish.com is a helpful free resource that focuses on teaching users basic writing and conversation skills for a business context.

As part of its general business resources, BusinessSpanish.com offers a customer service vocabulary list with over 30 common words and phrases. Each word and phrase also offers audio, so this is a great tool for beginning Spanish students.

BusinessSpanish.com also provides a customer service lesson that uses the vocabulary in context through dialogues. This is a great way for beginners to learn basic skills that they can immediately apply to a customer service setting.

Spanish for Your Job offers this helpful YouTube video to teach you common phrases that you may use in customer service work.

Each phrase is spoken in Spanish, English and then Spanish again. The phrases also appear on the screen to help you connect the written and spoken words. Additionally, some phrases are also accompanied by an alternate phrase with the same meaning to provide you with some options.

Phrases for Customer Service Representatives is approachable for beginning learners since it offers clear audio. It’s also a good tool for intermediate and advanced speakers who need to learn Spanish for specific customer service contexts.

If you want to practice these valuable phrases on the go, you can also download it as a podcast for free. That same link also offers a free PDF transcript to go along with the lesson, as well as several other lessons that can help you learn Spanish for other business-related contexts.

Useful English Customer Service Vocabulary is a free list of vocabulary and phrases. It’s actually intended to help Spanish speakers learn English vocabulary, but it also works well in reverse.

Each phrase is accompanied by both the Spanish and English equivalent. The list is organized to follow the standard flow of a typical customer service conversation, so it’s easy to learn valuable phrases in the order in which you would likely use them.

Since no audio of the words/phrases is available, this resource is best for learners who already have some familiarity with the Spanish language and its pronunciation.

123 Teach Me offers this helpful free list of over 60 words and phrases to help you learn customer service Spanish.

You can study using flashcards with accompanying audio and associated images. Additionally, you can practice the words through various games and activities like a word order quiz, a spelling activity and a matching game.

The versatility of this tool makes it a good choice for beginning through advanced students who are looking to build their customer service vocabulary.

Study.com offers a variety of lessons to help you learn new information. As part of its “Spanish for the Workplace” lesson, Study.com offers a chapter on customer service Spanish.

This chapter shares commonly-used words, phrases, questions and more to help you master Spanish for customer service. Pronunciation guides will help beginning students with the pronunciation. However, the site would probably be easiest to use for learners who have at least basic Spanish skills.

If you want to test your learning, there’s also a quiz.

You can access some of the lesson for free, but full access requires a subscription. A free trial is available, and subscriptions start at $39.99 per month.

MySpanishTeacher offers a selection of online Spanish courses, including one that focuses on customer service.

The online customer service course is available any time and features 15 hours of seminar-style classes. It covers vocabulary for topics like returns, account payments, computers and more. The course also covers basic grammar rules, so it’s ideal for beginning to intermediate Spanish students.

You can also print resources to have convenient study tools that you can use as references throughout your career.

If you complete the course, you get a certificate, which is a handy way to show your accomplishment.

TakeLessons offers a live, small-group class that teaches Spanish for customer service. If you learn best in a traditional classroom setting, this is a similar option, but it moves the classroom online.

The course is designed for beginners, so it covers basic Spanish grammar like the use of usted (formal “you”) along with customer service vocabulary and phrases. Plus, the small group setting makes it easy to practice your skills with other students.

The course is not offered all the time, so check back for course dates. Taking the course requires a subscription to TakeLessons, which costs $19.95 per month after a free trial month.

This learning kit comes with a CD, a CD-ROM and a spiral-bound manual, making it a great tool for anyone looking for a flexible learning option.

Since the kit focuses on memorization rather than grammar rules, you can follow it without any previous Spanish experience.

To try to make the pronunciations easier for listeners to replicate, the CD features an American speaker. The discs allow for easy playback, and the publishers even suggest that you might try playing phrases to communicate with Spanish speakers if you aren’t comfortable saying them yourself. The CD-ROM also features additional tools like a pronunciation guide, dialogues and quizzes.

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